The Pawnbroker (29 page)

"
Una furtiva lagrima...
"

He hummed along with the cello-like voice and the dim, lost orchestral accompaniment, which sounded like one feeble harmonica. Idly, he exulted in the fact of his high, rich tower, the sumptuousness of everything that touched him. It had been so long since he had had time to gloat. Besides, he usually never even thought about his success because he had always known it would happen this way, barring some accident. But there were times like now, when he enjoyed dipping into his treasure chest, savoring what he had by contrasting it unsentimentally with what he had had in the beginning. His father and mother, two people bent earthward by their work on the two acres of stony soil outside Palermo; himself, young and ragged and sullen under the yoke of poverty, maddened by the mistrals blowing up out of Africa. He wondered if either of his parents might still be alive. He had never felt obliged to get in touch with them in all the years; they had given him nothing except life, and that without premeditation. He had never had any need to placate his spirit, to propitiate his conscience. What was a conscience? There was no such organ, and if there was such a thing as a soul or a God, well that was just too bad. He would never twist himself into shapes he didn't fit. Life was a battle, and he was a battler. He enjoyed beauty, to a certain point. At least for him, beauty ran to the edge of a sheer cliff; beyond that edge was a peculiar emptiness, which sometimes echoed with dim and lovely voices. Perhaps he occasionally felt a little wistful that there were those things beyond his appreciation; it was no more than an infrequent puff of air, a frail scent—he could live without it.

Only now the thought of the Pawnbroker intruded on his idyl. That situation was no good, no good at all. He starts up trouble, makes some kind of stink, and before you know it, I got the Revenue Department on me, investigating committees. Well, no sense making a big thing out of that Yid. He would get one more warning and then ... Too bad. I got an idea he's got a brain in his head. It might have been a pleasure to talk things over with a guy with brains. Too bad, he's just falling apart. Ah, besides, what the hell would we have talked about; politics, the opera, history? I bet he knows a little something about them things, too. Eh, you can't have everything, intellectual talkin' and efficiency both. Too bad, too bad. He began humming again as he sipped at the drink, and the rain tried to interfere, with its spitefully uneven rhythm.

"
Cielo e mar,
" he sang softly with the dead man.

He shook his head scornfully at the thought of the poor Sicilian earth; he remembered how it looked, beaten by the rain.

 

Upstairs, above Sol's room, Morton sat drawing at his table. He was drawing his Uncle Sol from a tiny snapshot. The paper was a blue-gray charcoal paper, and he filled in heavy darks around the large, puffy head of the Pawnbroker so that it seemed to lean out of the flat dimension of the surface. He made the round, old-fashioned spectacles reflect the light so that only a suggestion of the eyes could be seen. But in the cast of the head, the line of mouth, the weary shine of high light, he imbued the subject with a look of gentleness and infinite patience. It was
his,
Morton Kantor's picture; he could have it the way he wanted it.

His sallow, unhealthy face was streaked with charcoal, and his shirt was stained with sweat. Finally he reached a point where his charcoal stick wandered uncertainly over the paper without making contact, and he realized he must be finished. He took the jar of fixative and blew through the atomizer to spray the portrait. Then he tacked it up on the opened closet door.

He realized how hot he was and saw that the window was closed. He opened it and stood for a minute looking out at the invisible, heavily dripping darkness, the occasional shine of black leaves from unidentifiable light sources. The air felt cool and soothing on him. For a moment he contemplated the new collection of pornographic pictures he had bought with the remainder of his tuition money. Then he thought he felt too tired even for that. He wondered what his uncle would say if he knew what some of his money went for. Well, he thinks I'm milking him anyhow, he thought with painful bitterness. So I am. He lay back on his bed and lit a cigarette, drew in the smoke with all his might and slowly exhaled it as he looked at the brooding, gentle figure on the blue-gray paper. Suddenly Morton began to cry. It lasted only a few minutes, and then he went back to his cigarette. But through his opened window, above the sound of the rain, he thought he heard, from the floor below, an echo of his crying.

 

Jesus Ortiz suddenly sat up out of sleep with a freezing sensation all over his body. What the hell am I thinkin'? I suppose to be smart? They just gonna go in that store, take his money, and walk out with him standin' there, wavin' good-by, sayin', "Come again, have some more money for you." What was I thinkin' about? And them three niggers never even think to ask how we get out of there quiet. No getaway car. Oh, but that Robinson maybe figure he fix it with his piece. Oh no. What come over me? What I want to do, commit suicide or something? Well ... maybe we just tie him up, gag him, and push him in the back room. Then I close up the store and ... yeah, that's it, no need to worry. But how the hell could I go ahead and not think about them things till now. Man ... He wiped at the sweat of his near-miss. Then he got up and went to the window to smoke a cigarette and watch the rain trying to wash the old filth from the streets. He felt calm again, quite able to ignore the icy dart of disaster he only half sensed deep inside.

Either in the hallucinatory foyer before sleep or already in dreams, he glimpsed again, briefly, the figure of a heavy man, awkwardly transfixed on a cross, a man with blue, cryptic numbers on his arm.

There was a shine to even the grimy landscape of the city, and the air was possessed of the clarity that frequently follows heavy rain. Nothing looked any newer or less ruined by age and filth, and yet there was a quality of richness, as with old bronzes in sunlight. Sol gazed at the familiar store fronts, the ugly façades, and suddenly, quite strangely, he felt a nostalgia for them, as though they had been the scenes of precious life for him.

A covey of women mounted the steps to the railroad platform, servants for the wealthy of Westchester and Fairfield. His sister, Bertha, had been lobbying for a
Shwartsa
to help her with her housework, and as he thought of that and watched the Negro women going up the steps, he imagined his sister at a slave auction, walking among the dark women, pinching, checking the condition of their teeth.

He was visited once more by that sharp and bewildering poignance, and he peered intensely at the dirt-wedged bricks of buildings, the grime insinuated like the grain in wood in every painted surface, the filth-encrusted sidewalks and gutters, wondering what there was in this pesthole of a city, among these blighted, ugly people, that made him suddenly yearn and remember the mood of sadness. And he felt a rare calm that lasted only as long as it would have taken a huge, slow-moving pendulum to make its arc.

And then he was before the store and that tautness, that distended surface of his spirit made itself known to him again. He went inside, cut off the burglar alarm, switched on the lights, and began taking the wire screens from the windows; it was as though he exposed himself again to the mysterious onslaught that would destroy him. One tiny thing, he didn't know yet what it would be, would break him apart that day, and all the dark force of the growth in him would burst out for him to recognize before it consumed him.

"Today is the twenty-eighth ... my anniversary, my anniversary," he said, standing behind the counter and gripping its edge as though for support against a vast wave. Fifteen years ago today his heart had atrophied; like the mammoth, he had been preserved in ice. What did he fear then? If the ice finally melts, the meat of the great entombed creature merely rots. One could only die once. He had been extinct for a long time, and only the carcass remained to be disposed of. Why, then, did he seize on the edge of the counter and tremble as he stared in terror at the sunlit doorway?

Jesus Ortiz came in at nine thirty, walking with an odd stiffness, as though something in the night had robbed him of his natural grace. His face was drawn, his eyes were feverishly bright, and he kept brushing tentatively at his long, straight hair, which was impeccably combed. He muttered something to Sol and then, when he got no answer, turned nervously toward the Pawnbroker and said, "Huh? What you say?"

Sol just shook his head, his eyes piercing and curious.

"I'll go upstairs, work with the clothes. You call me if you want me." Jesus looked at Sol as if there were something strange in that, as if he did not trust what he heard, even his own voice.

Jesus questioned that, too, with his eyes.

"All right, go upstairs," Sol said gently.

"Oh ... yeah. I be upstairs. You jus' call then..."

The Pawnbroker nodded reassuringly, as though to a child. While he watched the slender figure of the youth slowly ascend the stairs, he continued to grip the edge of the counter.

Leopold S. Schneider came in with the same greasy bag under his arm. His hair was wild and soft, and it made a dull halo around his bony head. "Do you remember me? Schneider? The oratory award?"

"Yes, I remember," Sol answered, taking his hands cautiously away from the counter.

"You still have my award, you haven't sold it?"

"I have turned down some fine offers for it."

"Well, I'll be in for it in about a week. I have something pending. Meanwhile, just to carry me over until I finish this play I'm working on ... I have this for you. How much can you loan me on it? It hurts me to let it out of my hands for even a week but, well..." Carefully, he skinned back the bag to reveal a pair of bronzed baby shoes. "My mother would turn in her grave ... but it's only for a little while," he said tremulously, holding them out delicately for the Pawnbroker to admire.

Sol sighed heavily, lidded his eyes, and slowly shook his head.

"They're mine ... when I was a baby," Leopold said tenderly, appreciating how touched the Pawnbroker seemed.

"How much do you want?"

"Ten dollars?"

"Five."

"All right, I'll take it. Just put them next to the award. Careful, don't scratch them," Leopold warned, his hands darting out in a flutter of apprehension. "Schneider, Leopold S. Schneider..."

The anniversary of Sol's death was beginning.

A tall marionette carved from some black wood, his limbs controlled erratically, approached Sol on a bias, his trunk aimed for the corner of the store as his legs twitched him to the counter. Sol waited, a little nerve in his own temple taking up the rhythm of the spastic walk, until the man was holding on to the counter with one struggling hand, his head beckoning constantly. Sol held on to his side of the counter with equal intensity, so it was as though each tugged against the other. He felt himself sweating as he tried to find the least tortured part of the man at which to look. Finally he discovered the eyes, which were black and solemnly lovely, like those of a deer, and which maintained a gloomy calm in the midst of the writhing surface of his face.

"I want to borrow ten dollars on this," he said, bringing up a large, flat, rectangular package like a silent tambourine. He settled it on the counter as one flattens a spinning coin and began trying to untie the knotted cord. But the string was a live thing in his hands; he raised his wild fingers and gave Sol a pulsing, twisting smile. "You better..."

And it seemed as great an effort for Sol to undo the knot. In the end, he cut the cord with a razor blade, and the spastic gave a little sigh as the string popped. Inside was a framed glass of brilliantly colored butterflies.

"What's this?" Sol said.

"Butterflies."

Sol looked at the man scornfully.

"I collect them. I have a lot more at home. For years I went into the country with a net, all the equipment....I don't know, lately I have lost interest." But then, noticing a look of rejection on the Pawnbroker's face, he hastened to reassure. "Oh, but I definitely will redeem it; don't worry on that score."

"What would I do with it if you didn't?" Sol shook his head. "I'll let you have five dollars. I couldn't even sell them for that."

"Oh, you'd be surprised how many people nowadays use them for decoration. And then there's lots of collectors like me. I got some very good ones there." He leaned over the glass, his ambling fingers striving to point to the brilliant bow-tie shapes. "That there, for instance, is a monarch, and that one is a great spangled fritillary. Oh, and see this here beauty, that's a mourning cloak and that one with the eye design, that's called a buckeye. And there's a tiger swallowtail, and a question-sign anglewing..."

"All that double talk means nothing to me. All right, all right, I'll give you eight dollars on it."

"That is not double talk," the spastic said, trying to compose his face for dignity. "Those are the real names of those butterflies. At one time I would have starved rather than let them out of my hands, even for a minute. But lately it doesn't seem to matter to me. All right, I'll take the eight dollars."

And Sol wrote up the transaction while the black lepidopterist danced his grotesquely patient dance; it seemed Sol could see it even through his lowered eyelids.

The next customer came in out of a flash of briefly reflected sunlight, so all Sol could see at first was the un-memorable shape of his head and shoulders and the two boxlike things he carried, one in each hand. And then he was in the undisputed domain of the fiuorescents and his deformed face was like a stunning noise in the quiet store. He had no lower jaw, only a gaping, wet redness and a restless tongue. Sol felt like screaming in rage and revulsion. What was the idea of letting such a creature out in the open?

"Yes," Sol said, fixing his attention on the two boxes and following them up when the man lifted them to the counter.